books.google.com - Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1835-1915) was a prolific writer, producing some 75 novels. The most famous one is her first novel, "Lady Audley's Secret" (1862), which won her immediate recognition and fortune....https://books.google.com/books/about/Lady_Audley_s_Secret.html?id=pj_ntS9AfNYC&utm_source=gb-gplus-shareLady Audley's Secret

Lady Audley's Secret

Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1835-1915) was a prolific writer, producing some 75 novels. The most famous one is her first novel, "Lady Audley's Secret" (1862), which won her immediate recognition and fortune.

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LibraryThing Review

User Review - etxgardener - LibraryThing

Yikes! What a book! Who said the Victorians led prim and proper lives? This romance/thriller has everything: bigamy, attempted murder, arson,theft and madness. What's not to like? The novel opens with ...Read full review

LibraryThing Review

User Review - kaitanya64 - LibraryThing

This is a great Victorian "sensation" novel, with a mystery involving a beautiful, evil heroine, an amateur detective, romance, palatial mansion setting etc. It is a shorter and faster read than is ...Read full review

References to this book

About the author (2008)

Mary Elizabeth Braddon, the daughter of a solicitor, was educated privately. As a young woman, she acted under an assumed name for three years in order to support herself and her mother. In 1860 she met John Maxwell, a publisher of periodicals, whose wife was in an asylum for the insane. Braddon acted as stepmother to Maxwell's five children and bore him five illegitimate children before the couple married, in 1874, when Maxwell's wife died. Braddon's most famous novel, Lady Audley's Secret (1862), was first published serially in Robin Goodfellow and The Sixpenny Magazine. One of the earliest sensationalist novels, it sold nearly one million copies during Braddon's lifetime. Its plot involves bigamy, the protagonist's desertion of her child, her murder of her first husband, and her thoughts of poisoning her second husband. The novel shocked and outraged her contemporary, Margaret Oliphant, who said Braddon had invented "the fair-haired demon of modern fiction." Throughout her long literary career, during which she wrote more than 80 novels and edited several magazines, Braddon was often excoriated for her penchant for sensationalizing violence, crime, and sexual indiscretion. Nevertheless, Braddon had many well-known devotees, among them William Makepeace Thackeray, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Braddon died in 1915.